


Don't Blink (Or You'll Miss Me)

by Copper_Nails (Her_Madjesty)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Feelings Realization, Mutual Pining, Pining, Romance, Suffering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 23:12:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13691832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Her_Madjesty/pseuds/Copper_Nails
Summary: Those who remain of Rogue One – and beyond Jyn, Chirrut, Baze, Cassian, and Bodhi, there are few – look like a child’s fairytale after the book’s been closed; they are a fable, a moral quandary; what not to do when your enemy is bigger and brighter and has spent more time manufacturing weapons of galactic destruction than you.





	Don't Blink (Or You'll Miss Me)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FreakCityPrincess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FreakCityPrincess/gifts).



> Happy Valentine's Day, folks, and to hoofgirl, who was my Secret Valentine recipient. Hoofgirl requested that Cassian and Jyn realize that they love each other while on a mission. This is kind of that. This is a sad, yet kind of hopeful, version of that.

I.

He’s bleeding.

Cassian presses his hand to his side and tries to ignore the steady throbbing of the wound beneath his hand, of the vertebrae shifting in his spine where the discs have caved in to let bone kiss bone. He keeps his eyes open in focusing on the crown of Jyn’s head. She’s strewn out by his knees, each breath of hers shallow, while across the hijacked Imperial transport, Chirrut lays slumped against the durasteel wall, abandoned by Baze only so that the ex-Guardian can guide the concussed Bodhi through the flight procedures to get them away from the burning beaches of Scarif.

It’s – unpleasant. Ramshackle. If K2S0 were still functional instead of a melted chassis in the ruins of Scarif’s archives, Cassian feels certain that the droid would have deafened the lot of them with complaints about their recklessness.

Those who remain of Rogue One – and beyond Jyn, Chirrut, Baze, and Bodhi, there are few – look like a child’s fairytale after the book’s been closed; they are a fable, a moral quandary; what not to do when your enemy is bigger and brighter and has spent more time manufacturing weapons of galactic destruction than you.

Cassian leans his head back against the wall of the transport and grunts as his vision fills with spots. At his knee, he thinks he hears Jyn snuffle; the warmth of her sweat-wet cheek bleeds through the leg of his borrowed Imperial trousers.

His eyes threaten to shut. The hand he reaches out with, to pet her hair, to wake her – something – is stained, but he doesn’t stop until he can feel the sand-strewn silk beneath his fingers.

Jyn lifts her head and blinks at him with bloodshot eyes.

Cassian feels a shock in his chest and tells himself it’s just an injury he’s forgotten to catalogue.

II.

Their departure from the transport is -

is -

flashes of white and orange and Mon Mothma’s hair as she hovers nearby, muttering into a comm while General Draven glowers, the vein in his forehead twitching and turning his skin an unappealing shade of mauve. Cassian’s mouth stretches out in a vague attempt at a cocky smile, something he’s borrowed from Jyn, but the tug of his muscles stings and the expression falls away.

He doesn’t see them take Jyn, too distracted by the shift of strange hands on his body as he’s loaded onto a stretcher. He doesn’t think to question that she’s not near to him until they’ve reached the medical ward and her crown of bloodied, brown hair is nowhere in sight.

“Where is she?” Cassian rasps, not bothering to clarify the “she”, not feeling the need. General Draven, now orange in the light of the base, glances in his direction but does not reply.

“Where is she?” Cassian demands. His voice snaps in half; what is meant to be authoritative is instead a broken boy’s call. The wave of self loathing that rises in his chest threatens to overwhelm him, but it is beaten down by the fear driving his heart rate into the atmo.

“Tribunal,” Draven grunts. The medical droids around him rush forward, pressing Cassian down onto his stretcher and chirping about internal bleeding, broken ribs, something – something – something.

“Tribunal?!”

Draven’s eye roll seems out of place with his best agent laying broken before him, but Cassian recognizes the steel behind his gaze. What is unfamiliar is the trace of regret in the wrinkle of his brow.

“The plans you retrieved were intercepted by Princess Leia,” Draven tells him, “who was then immediately captured by Darth Vader.”

(Across the galaxy, unbeknownst to the pulsing stars – to the Rebellion’s inner circle, to everyone but Leia Organa – the citizens of Alderaan inhale a collective, final breath.)

“What does Jyn have to do with that?” Cassian loses his breath mid-sentence, but the words demand release. His knuckles are white; the droid nearest to his chest reports an unhealthy increase in heart rate.

Draven narrows his eyes and falls behind as the stretcher breaches the base’s medical ward. Cassian presses up against his surrounding aids; there is a wildness in him that renders him unrecognizable for a breath, maybe two.

He doesn’t know himself as the droids force him into bacta, squirming, desperate, fingers itching for a comm or a syringe or a blaster. That last thing Cassian knows is the soft-wrong press of gel against his injuries and the memory of Jyn’s name on his lips; the taste of salt and sweat and -

III.

Jyn tastes iron in her mouth as the Rebellion cuffs her straight out of the transport. The fight in her sputters at the sight of Mon Mothma’s teary eyes; she goes to the war room glowering but without resistance.

Draven, when he arrives, has blood on his shirt and on his finger tips. Jyn narrows her eyes and tracks him across the room, staring him down as he comes to sit in front of her.

With a wave of his hand, the war room clears of aids, of droids – of everyone save for himself, General Cracken, and Mon Mothma, occupying an inauspicious corner.

“You,” Draven says, “have compromised two of the Rebellion’s best agents in under twenty four standard hours. If you hadn’t risked your ass to get your father’s supposed Death Star plans off of that Imperial shithole, I’d have you accused of spycraft.”

Jyn shift her weight and observes the general. Hands behind her back, she can work the mechanisms of her cuffs unobserved.

“You’re not clever enough for that, though,” Draven continues. “What I am hoping is that you’re clever enough to take a good deal when you see one.”

Jyn raises an eyebrow. “I didn’t know the Rebellion stooped to bribery.”

Draven laughs. It’s not a happy sound. Across the room, Cracken folds his arms across his chest; Mon Mothma presses a hand to her white-clad chest and refuses to meet Jyn’s eye.

“We’re getting you off of this base,” Draven tells her. “That’s happening whether or not you like it. Your choice is whether or not you get to keep contributing to the galaxy in a meaningful way.”

It’s Jyn’s turn to laugh. The whole of her chest stutters.

(She can still feel the dying warmth of Cassian’s body against hers, the points of his knees digging into her skin and the unfortunate stench of his sweat and blood and forgiveness. They’ll have whisked him somewhere safe; he is one of their two best agents.)

(Draven may not think her clever, but Jyn still reckons that she can guess the second.)

“Tell me,” she says, patient as can be (while behind her back, the last of her cuffs’ dignity is shredded beneath her fingers), “why should I work for you at all? What do I get out of this besides warm fuzzies in my stomach?”

There’s a flicker of something in Draven’s eyes that looks like anger; it’s lessened only by another flit, almost like amusement. “We keep the pilot alive.”

Jyn bites the inside of her cheek to keep her shock in check.

“And,” Draven continues, “you receive Rebellion benefits. Access to our medical care, for example.” He eyes the dried blood on her forehead, then observes her shallow breathing. “Just get off this base, do a bit of work, and we’ll all be happy with one another.”

Jyn forces down another broken laugh. “All this because two of your agents decided to grow spines?”

Any goodwill hidden in the creases of Draven’s face dies. “One of my agents has _broken_ his spine, Miss Erso,” he spits. “It will take a miracle to get him out of bacta in one piece; he is _never_ going to be able to go back into the field.”

“And if he’d been killed in a Death Star blast, he’d never have been able to do anything at all.”

Draven flexes his hand and raises it. The velocity redirects to his temples, where he braces and squeezes away what Jyn assumes to be a stress headache.

(She’d flinched, watching him, and she hates herself for it; hates herself for seeing the man in white – the Imperial, Director Krennic behind General Draven’s piggy eyes).

“Do you want treatment?” the general demands, when the silence in the war room crawls for too long.

Jyn considers him.

(Chirrut, she knows, and Baze will be fine, no matter what she chooses; they’re as likely to stay on the base as she is, at this point. Bodhi is the strongest lever Draven has working for him, though Jyn doesn’t know the pilot well; his loyalty to her father and wide, broken eyes are her fault – the absent daughter, Saw’s fearful lead, the cause of his suffering and torture. And Cassian -)

“I’ll work for you,” she grits out.

Draven schools his victory behind a passive face and nods. He brushes dirt away from his pants as he rises, motioning Mon Mothma forward.

Jyn keeps her gaze locked with him as the senator approaches, the key to Jyn’s cuffs clutched between her fingers.

Mon Mothma is three paces away when Jyn lets the cuffs drop. They bounce when they hit the floor of the war room; the noise echoes off the walls and into the deep, unfriendly silence.

Draven sighs.

Despite everything – the threats, the terror, the pain – Jyn smiles.

IV.

And she leaves.

The transport that takes her away from Yavin IV is cramped and manned only by a droid of a designation she doesn’t recognize; more likely a scrapped together navigational being she’s not supposed to care about. She waits by its side and listens to its off-key chirping as she plays with a lifted comm, scanning through Bodhi’s records from the medical ward and Draven’s complaints about Chirrut and Baze’s abrupt disappearance.

Cassian remains locked in his bacta tank, inaccessible and still. Jyn watches him through Yavin IV’s security footage and does not bite her lip; does not chew on the inside of her cheek until it bleeds.

The droid lets out a long, purring whir – the transport is ready. Jyn hums back and sets the comm aside, eyes fixing not on the hangar (where, again, Mon Mothma hides herself in a corner, seemingly unaware of how the white of her clothes contrast with the shadows). Rather, Jyn finds Yavin IV’s horizon above the treeline.

She and the droid work in tandem to take the transport up and out.

(The only whispers of her name across the base on Yavin IV will be silenced until Cassian wakes, and by that time, she will have been forgotten in favor of Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, and the smuggler, Han Solo. Bodhi and Cassian will exchange glances in the medical ward and breathe her name until they send the droids running; Draven, when he comes to answer their unvoiced questions, will hem and haw until Cassian snags a comm of his own and slices through layers upon layers of encryption to find where the Rebellion has sent her.)

Jyn does not allow herself to think of these things. Instead, she chirps back to her droid companion as their transport breaks atmo. The ache in her heart, she tells herself, is no more than a memory from Scarif; the thing pulling her back is just gravity, not a longing, not a guilt, not a rage buried only by exhaustion and bribery and love -

V.

(He loves her. Cassian slams closed fists against the fragile skeleton of his cot and shivers as he cries, desperate to stay quiet while, some scant feet away, Bodhi sleeps for the first time in days. He loves her, and they’ve taken her in order to make him something he’s not; something he can no longer be, now that he’s held her in her anger, seen her stare down an enemy and leave him at the touch of his own hand, the call of his own voice.

“Welcome home,” he’d murmured, and murmurs now, in the silence and the shiver and the squander; “welcome home,” he’d said, never meaning for it to be a lie.)

(It takes him too long to realize that – that it doesn’t have to be. That he has a choice. But by then, sirens are blaring and the Death Star is coming and everyone’s acting like the world’s going to end, like it hadn’t already ended on a transport with one of his hands in her hair.)

VI.

A farm boy, a scoundrel, a princess, and the bulk of Red and Gold squadron shoot down the Death Star in some play on a miracle. Cassian watches the x’s of their formations flutter from a stiff-backed chair in the war room as they make their way back to Yavin IV, their voices crowing over the comms. There are new tears on his cheeks, though he cannot feel them; rather, he is floating, detached from the still-healing mass that is his body.

When he retreats, some hours or maybe minutes or maybe seconds later, his comm pings. Cassian pulls the device up from his side and wipes the tears from his cheeks, willing the pressure in his sinuses away.

The message is unsigned and encrypted within an inch of its life. Cassian frowns, but he does not look towards the reveling crowds, does not dare reveal more than momentary confusion. He reads through the message once, then again, then again as celebratory cheers fill the base.

The thundering of his heart, when the meaning of the message breaks free, threatens to drown out all the noise on Yavin IV; all the noise in the galaxy.

| ur boss is a hard ass. glad u r still alive

He doesn’t want to think about it – doesn’t want to acknowledge what it is that she means, what Draven’s said, where he’s sent her and how he, Cassian, is going to make his way to her. Instead, Cassian traces his fingers over the keys of his comm and sends her a message of his own.

| You can’t get rid of me that easily.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you thought. It's 3am upon posting this; I'll fix minor errors come morning proper.


End file.
